Leonardo Bertinelli

Product-minded iOS Developer

Ciao 👋

I’m Leonardo, a iOS Developer working at Blinkist📚.I co-founded Sunlitt ☀️, a delightful app that puts the sun at the center of your life. Sunlitt is an Apple Design Awards 2024 finalist.Check out my game Dotillism 🟣 if you want to have a relaxing gaming experience!

I'm an entrepreneurial soul very much into game design and photography.I graduated from Apple Developer Academy where I led a small team to build and publish two apps on the App Store.Before switching my career into tech I worked as a Product Manager for an indie tabletop games studio, developing games and raising more than $1.4 million on Kickstarter.

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About me

Hello!

I'm Leonardo ✌️

I'm Leonardo, a creative individual passionate about technology.I have professional experience as iOS Developer and Product Manager, but my background is in the creative field.My curiosity and hunger to learn something new made me delve into many different things in my life, interacting with tech, entrepreneurship, and coding.My diverse background shaped profoundly the person that I am and the way I approach my work. My personality is built on three main pillars: I'm a creative individual passionate about visual media and creativity as a process. I'm a nerd passionate about tech and coding. I have an entrepreneurial spirit and I always try to create and build new things.

Honors & awards

Bio (TLDR short version)

Personal Interests

My curiosity brought me to try many different things in life, some of those become lifelong passions.

Extended Bio 💬

In the beginning

While studying Communications and Media studies at a university, I decided to co-found a tech startup with some friends to develop an app, and exited a year later selling my shares to an investor after some major disagreements with other founders. At the same time, I founded the biggest Italian fan community for Starbound (the award winning indie game). An adventure that continued for three years and gathered all the Italian players of the title.After these entrepreneurial adventures, I came back to university and was ready to finish my degree, but the universe had other plans for me and after a while I was contacted by another startup, one too exciting to turn down.

Product Manager @ Tabula Games

After the first year spent working in marketing and learning the ropes of this crowdfunded-based business model, I became product manager for the next projects. The company was small and I worked closely to the founders, meaning that I was able to approach many different aspects of the business and take business critical decisions that impacted our business and all of our users.Developing projects for crowdfunding meant being always under the spotlight of enthusiastic, but hard to please fans. For this reason, user-centered development was our mantra. All our decisions stemmed from a deep understanding of what our users wanted and expected from our products.
The market for crowdfunded games is really competitive, with many big companies pushing the bar higher each month. As an indie studio, we always had to be really creative in how we developed our products.At Tabula I achieved many great results: I built products loved by their users and learned many different things in the hustle and bustle of a small studio that had limited resources and a great vision.

Apple Developer Academy

After finishing my degree and a brief pandemic-driven hiatus of freelance marketer work, I decided to join Apple Developer Academy to translate my product management expertise into the tech field.The Academy truly was a great place to improve and grow my product skills. In each of the projects I participated in, I naturally started leading the team toward a common goal and vision that would get us excited. The "Challenge Based Learning" model used at the Academy allowed me to apply many principles like design thinking, agile methodologies, product discovery, UX research. I also had many opportunities to develop my soft skills like leadership, presentation, public speaking, negotiation, you name it.I wanted to get as much as possible out of this experience, which is why I also decided to approach coding seriously. While coming from a vastly different background, I’ve always been passionate about technology and computers. Over the years I always found ways to tinker with code and I decided to take this opportunity to get serious as a developer.At the Academy, my result-driven nature showed itself up. I wanted to make the best of every opportunity I was handed and I ended up developing many prototypes.
I managed to have my team launch an app on App Store in the mid of the course, being the first team of the year to reach App Store.Our final project, Sunlitt, has been selected to be showcased on stage at our graduation ceremony in front of hundreds of people including Apple executives and the press.During the development of Sunlitt, we also decided to release our library as an open source package: SunKit. The app is still in active development by me and the team of co-founders, all eager to implement our roadmap packed with many features.

Now

After graduating from Apple Developer Academy I started to work as a freelance iOS Developer while also continuing to work on projects like Sunlitt.In march 2023 i joined Blinkist as an iOS Developer.
From then onward I continued to focus my career on iOS development, continuing to work on Sunlitt in my free time along with my amazing co-founders.

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Hackathons

I participated in the following hackathons about product ideation and development.

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Crowdfunded Games

As a product manager for Tabula Games I developed the company's most successful product line to date, acting also as the creative director to ensure the artistic vision of the games would be shared among the titles.Being in the spotlight of a Kickstarter campaign, with many eager fans waiting for your work, is an incredible experience that taught me many important things about product development and management with a user-centered approach.These projects taught me a lot about working under pressure in a lean environment where everything changes quickly. Being a small lean indie studio also taught me how to interact, influence, listen and negotiate with creative professionals, users, founders, and other stakeholders.

Highligts

Pictures

• Mysthea Kickstarter project
• Volfyirion Kikcstarter project
• Icaion Kickstarter project

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Leonardo Bertinelli